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Does anyone think it's crazy that a glorified messaging app is valued at $16B and that SpaceX, a company that puts things into orbit and literally does rocket s

Does anyone think it's crazy that a glorified messaging app is valued at $16B and that SpaceX, a company that puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science, is only $10B? I'm sure WhatsApp is an outlier because I see it brought up all the time when the topic of valuation arises but it still seems like SpaceX should be worth a lot more to me.

pwnna 12y ago
Don't forget that Facebook's market cap is almost 200B...
- imranq 12y ago
  The reason facebook is worth that much is because its network effects have been realized. The social utility of 1 person on a network is nothing, but with 1 billion it's incredible. Humans can't perceive exponential effects intuitively and on the scale of SpaceX its almost impossible.
gtirloni 12y ago
I think the two sides of this discussion are battling between current economics vs. ROI for humanity. WhatsApp adds almost zero because there are many other options to text everybody. So it's just another company that got traction. It could die tomorrow and nobody would worry much. It can be easily replaced. There is no long lasting value (again, due to so many other options and the easiness of creating it from scratch again). Text chatting is a exhausted marketed, in terms of innovation. If WhatsApp is secretly working on hologram technology then it'd be another entirely different matter, but I doubt that's their focus. SpaceX, on the other hand, is making breakthroughs in engineering and science. What they create will be with us for a long time, can yield multiple patents, can feed into other inventions.. I think it's very difficult to argue that creating technology that allows us to go to other planets has little value. I think it has a lot. So I think we're substituting the question "where should humanity invest money?" for "which companies are correctly valued". The latter is much easier to answer based on economics. The former, quite difficult to agree on.
- free2rhyme214 12y ago
  I totally agree with you. I think we all know Facebook overpaid for Whatapp and SpaceX has a higher realistic valuation. Great post!
InclinedPlane 12y ago
It's a side effect of incremental margins on different goods/services. Selling physical things has a lot of overhead, requires lots of big, expensive capital equipment, has a modest profit margin, and has a narrow range of scalability. Selling virtual goods and services has a small overhead, huge scalability range, and potentially enormous profit margins (approaching 100%). This leads to weirdness as you've described where the fact that a billion people deriving marginal utility from something is far more valuable than a much more "important" market where the utility is much higher but the volume is low. But this isn't a new phenomenon, there's also the situation of movie/tv/music stars related to industry, for example, which we've largely come to accept as normal but is equally bizarre. There are stars who are multi-millionaires despite having sort of sub par work, but because it appeals to such a large market and because scaling and incremental profit can be so high in media it's much easier to get rich. Johnny Knoxville has more annual revenue than lots of small companies working on very hard and interesting problems, that's just the way the economics works out.
rayiner 12y ago
Worldwide commercial launch revenue in 2012 was $6.5 billion. Growing, but unlikely to explode any time soon. Global advertising spending worldwide was $509 billion. The valuations make total sense in the context of those figures. Until there is something useful in space other than satellites, market value for space companies won't be that high.
- pwnna 12y ago
  True, yet so depressing
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Advertising is a zero-sum game and is in theory capable of consuming (i.e. wasting) an infinite amount of resources, so it's not really good for comparing with space launches.
    - fleitz 12y ago
      How is advertising zero sum? It is true that ad spends generally result in diminishing returns, however diminishing returns are far from zero sum. In industries subject to economies of scale advertising is actually really good for economic efficiency and does not at all waste resources rather causing them to be used more effectively.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Because after the initial period of your customers not knowing about a whole category of products, you're just spending money on getting people come to you instead of to a competitor. It's zero-sum, because what you and your competitors spend on ads mostly cancel out - you're competing for a limited, finite pool of customers.
      - tomp 12y ago
        It's zero sum for the advertisers - for each ad spot, there can only be one ad, so if I win the auction, you lose. Of course, since it's an auction, the winner will be spending increasing amounts of money on it, with no real upside (still the same amount of ads displayed). It's all very good money for the ad platform/brokers.
a1a 12y ago
I'd say (without much knowledge of SpaceX's financials) that it probably shouldn't be valued any higher. I'd argue it's fallacious to compare with WhatsApp because it's obviously overvalued. Adding some perspective: Ferrari enterprise value: $6.03bn Heineken enterprise value: $11.857bn American Airlines enterprise value: $10.666bn KFC enterprise value: $19.492bn Audi enterprise value: $17.731bn Clean water for the entire planet: $10bn Top 50 college football programs: $15bn World's music industry: $16bn Mozambique's GDP: $18.9bn Sources: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/02/20/19-brands-facebook-could-have-bought-19bn-instead-whatsapp http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/02/20/19-brands-facebook-co... http://list25.com/25-things-facebook-could-buy-with-19-billion-instead-of-whatsapp/ http://list25.com/25-things-facebook-could-buy-with-19-billi... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10652397/Facebook-buys-WhatsApp-but-what-could-it-have-spent-the-money-on-instead.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10652397/Face...
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I get most of those except for the college football programs. But I do see why for others there is value there, bread, beer and entertainment (or, as it was in the old days, bread & circuses) have been able to capture very large audiences for millennia. (And the Music Industry and Heineken are reprentatives of the same category.)
  - igravious 12y ago
    It is my opinion that it is generally fallacious to compare Market Cap with GDP. Why? Cuz GDP is a measure of economic output (throughput, generally per annum) whereas Market Cap is a measure of worth at a moment in time. The units don't match up but since they are frequently omitted we get unlike things being compared. What do you reckon?
    - roymurdock 12y ago
      Agreed - GDP is a historical record of a year's worth of activity. Therefore GDP more accurately corresponds to a company's net revenue - a net of what the country produced/consumed/spent/imported/exported/invested over a year. Market cap takes future earnings and total value into account. There is no such calculation for countries, but a country's "Market Cap" (potential) should, in most cases, be higher than its "Net Revenues.
readerrrr 12y ago
Only at first glance. They are valued at 10B$ and they still only launch less than 10 rockets per year. When they reach 100 or 1000 launches, their value will go up with the same ratio or even more. This is something WhatsApp can't possibly do, as their market can't grow much more, but space is only starting to.
- danielweber 12y ago
  No, the investors have already anticipated that. Modulo market risk, $10 billion is what SpaceX is expected to be worth.
  - readerrrr 12y ago
    Sure right now. I was talking more about 10-20 years into the future.
gretful 12y ago
hell yeah, a messaging app won't save the human race. If Elon is successful in his endeavor, we won't have to worry about a single planet-event wiping out the human race.
- harryh 12y ago
  Elon is building a satellite launching company. Nowhere in that endeavor is the technology to permanently move a sufficient number of people to some other planet. The differences between what SpaceX does today and a self sufficient permanent colony on Mars are far far greater than the difference between what SpaceX does today and and the fireworks I shot off last weekend.
  - ufmace 12y ago
    I don't think the people downvoting you realize just how big of a project a self-sufficient off-planet colony is. Nobody really knows how many people it would take to be self-sufficient, but I'm guessing that it's at least 100,000. The total number of people who have been to space, from all countries' space programs over the course of ~60 years or so, is 536, and not one of them has left Earth orbit. Looks like we need at least 3 orders of magnitude of improvement before we can even start to think about it. If SpaceX's program for reusable rockets succeeds beyond Musk's wildest dreams, we might get like 1 order of magnitude of cost reduction. There's still a hell of a long way to go, and that's if everything works perfectly. A semi-permanent colony might be doable, but anyone there wouldn't last long without regular resupply from Earth.
  - readerrrr 12y ago
    You comment is doubly wrong. Spacex is definitely not limited to satellites, they are planning to launch people in space and are currently delivering cargo to the space station. There are plenty of information, some by Spacex, that show how their technology could be used for a permanent settlement on mars. Their goal: SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.
  - 12y ago
smackfu 12y ago
Besides the other comments, it seems like a mistake to compare purchase price to investor valuations. Buying control of a company is worth a lot more than buying part of it.
damoncali 12y ago
There isn't a whole lot of money in space. There is a ton of money in communications.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptoz 12y ago
  Much of the future of communications is in space. For example, a lot of the recent and upcoming SpaceX rocket launches are communications satellites.
  - damoncali 12y ago
    Yeah, but that's nothing new, and there still isn't much money there. And space colonization is so far in the future it gets discounted down to zero. If SpaceX is mispriced, it's on the high side if you ask me.
  - grondilu 12y ago
    > Much of the future of communications is in space. Not obvious. This month Google announced a big trans-pacific underwater internet cable system, for instance. Although it is clear satellites still have a major role in intercontinental communications, it's not clear to me whether this role will prevail in the future. ref: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-asian-companies-invest-trans-122646792.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-asian-companies-invest-...
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  It's not the communications money that drives insane valuations of random apps, it's the advertising money.
- dragonbonheur 12y ago
  Get mining robots to an asteroid and there will be a LOT of money in space.
rsynnott 12y ago
Which one has most revenue potential, though? SpaceX makes medium-heavy rockets, and will soon make a super-heavy. This means that their primary competition is the Ariane 5 (especially once they have their super-heavy, which will allow them to compete in the heavy GTO market). Ariane 5 is currently on about 5 launches a year costing 140m euro a shot, and SpaceX plans to undercut it. Let's say they take the whole Ariane 5 market, and also the whole commercial Proton market. That's probably about a billion a year, in a fairly low-profit market. Of course, they also make some money on NASA contracting and grants, but I don't think anyone has ever managed a huge valuation on being a government contractor. It's entirely possible that SpaceX will open up whole new fields of space industry, but at this point it's hardly something that most people are going to bet on.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  > I don't think anyone has ever managed a huge valuation on being a government contractor. Lockheed Martin is worth around $52B on the NYSE.
  - rsynnott 12y ago
    Sorry, should have been clearer; I don't think anyone has ever managed a huge speculative valuation. Lockheed Martin has a normal big-company P/E (~16, about the same as Apple or Microsoft, or half of Google's); their price is justified by earnings. Now, if they had a Facebook-like (88) or Amazon-like (880) P/E, that'd be different.
rglover 12y ago
Definitely agree and that was my first thought after reading this headline. I'd say that it's due to delayed gratification/not seeing the forest for the trees.
athenot 12y ago
Value here is defined by how much it's worth to one (or more) people. Think of it as a price. It does not represent an objective contribution to humanity. Is a seat in Orchestra section really worth 3 times more than one in balcony? Hard to tell, but some will pay that difference because they consider it worth it FOR THEM, therefore that's the valuation of that seat.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Unfortunately that's not how economics works. Inbuilt into your statement are a couple of biases. Chiefly, that on the basis of total economic value: glorified messaging app < puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science ...which is not necessarily the case. Now, we can talk all day about whether EMH is accurate or not and if the investors in these companies have "perfect information" or not, but there would have to be pretty conclusive evidence that there is something other than economic forces impacting investors valuation of these companies.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > glorified messaging app < puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science This is obviously not true if you count economic value, and obviously true if you count "value" as in something good and useful for humanity. In our economy, the former is a proxy for the latter, but both forms of "value" are getting more and more misaligned nowdays.
lnanek2 12y ago
What does SpaceX do as a business? Sell a few super expensive products per year. The number of governments and companies that can afford their product will never be large, ever. What does WhatsApp do? It hooks millions of consumers on freemium offerings and sells cheap add-ons to hundreds of thousands a year. Users often use it multiple times a day. WhatsApp sounds like a much better business.
pvnick 12y ago
Keep in mind that much of Facebook's purpose in buying WhatsApp was protection against it becoming the dominant player in social media. Facebook is always needing to protect itself against being overtaken by the Next Big Thing, so their strategy is to buy potential competitors before that happens. WhatsApp had a steep upward velocity, so the price Facebook paid for it was based less on its current worth and more on its trajectory.
fleitz 12y ago
Not at all, usually what the 'intelligensia' thinks are 'important' industries are not really that important at all. Things that benefit the common man are usually way better economic bets than lofty ideals. Getting most of india talking to each other is far more important than a 50 people circling the earth.
brooksbp 12y ago
Is "a glorified messaging app" vs. "puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science" a fair comparison? Surely there are deeper technical challenges and social motivations to "a glorified messaging app". How about considering the value of wide-spread human communication vs. multi-planetary human existence & space research?

pwnna 12y ago

Don't forget that Facebook's market cap is almost 200B...

imranq 12y ago
The reason facebook is worth that much is because its network effects have been realized. The social utility of 1 person on a network is nothing, but with 1 billion it's incredible. Humans can't perceive exponential effects intuitively and on the scale of SpaceX its almost impossible.

gtirloni 12y ago

I think the two sides of this discussion are battling between current economics vs. ROI for humanity. WhatsApp adds almost zero because there are many other options to text everybody. So it's just another company that got traction. It could die tomorrow and nobody would worry much. It can be easily replaced. There is no long lasting value (again, due to so many other options and the easiness of creating it from scratch again). Text chatting is a exhausted marketed, in terms of innovation. If WhatsApp is secretly working on hologram technology then it'd be another entirely different matter, but I doubt that's their focus. SpaceX, on the other hand, is making breakthroughs in engineering and science. What they create will be with us for a long time, can yield multiple patents, can feed into other inventions.. I think it's very difficult to argue that creating technology that allows us to go to other planets has little value. I think it has a lot. So I think we're substituting the question "where should humanity invest money?" for "which companies are correctly valued". The latter is much easier to answer based on economics. The former, quite difficult to agree on.

free2rhyme214 12y ago
I totally agree with you. I think we all know Facebook overpaid for Whatapp and SpaceX has a higher realistic valuation. Great post!

InclinedPlane 12y ago

It's a side effect of incremental margins on different goods/services. Selling physical things has a lot of overhead, requires lots of big, expensive capital equipment, has a modest profit margin, and has a narrow range of scalability. Selling virtual goods and services has a small overhead, huge scalability range, and potentially enormous profit margins (approaching 100%). This leads to weirdness as you've described where the fact that a billion people deriving marginal utility from something is far more valuable than a much more "important" market where the utility is much higher but the volume is low. But this isn't a new phenomenon, there's also the situation of movie/tv/music stars related to industry, for example, which we've largely come to accept as normal but is equally bizarre. There are stars who are multi-millionaires despite having sort of sub par work, but because it appeals to such a large market and because scaling and incremental profit can be so high in media it's much easier to get rich. Johnny Knoxville has more annual revenue than lots of small companies working on very hard and interesting problems, that's just the way the economics works out.

rayiner 12y ago

Worldwide commercial launch revenue in 2012 was $6.5 billion. Growing, but unlikely to explode any time soon. Global advertising spending worldwide was $509 billion. The valuations make total sense in the context of those figures. Until there is something useful in space other than satellites, market value for space companies won't be that high.

pwnna 12y ago
True, yet so depressing
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Advertising is a zero-sum game and is in theory capable of consuming (i.e. wasting) an infinite amount of resources, so it's not really good for comparing with space launches.
  - fleitz 12y ago
    How is advertising zero sum? It is true that ad spends generally result in diminishing returns, however diminishing returns are far from zero sum. In industries subject to economies of scale advertising is actually really good for economic efficiency and does not at all waste resources rather causing them to be used more effectively.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Because after the initial period of your customers not knowing about a whole category of products, you're just spending money on getting people come to you instead of to a competitor. It's zero-sum, because what you and your competitors spend on ads mostly cancel out - you're competing for a limited, finite pool of customers.
    - tomp 12y ago
      It's zero sum for the advertisers - for each ad spot, there can only be one ad, so if I win the auction, you lose. Of course, since it's an auction, the winner will be spending increasing amounts of money on it, with no real upside (still the same amount of ads displayed). It's all very good money for the ad platform/brokers.

a1a 12y ago

I'd say (without much knowledge of SpaceX's financials) that it probably shouldn't be valued any higher. I'd argue it's fallacious to compare with WhatsApp because it's obviously overvalued. Adding some perspective: Ferrari enterprise value: $6.03bn Heineken enterprise value: $11.857bn American Airlines enterprise value: $10.666bn KFC enterprise value: $19.492bn Audi enterprise value: $17.731bn Clean water for the entire planet: $10bn Top 50 college football programs: $15bn World's music industry: $16bn Mozambique's GDP: $18.9bn Sources: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/02/20/19-brands-facebook-could-have-bought-19bn-instead-whatsapp http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/02/20/19-brands-facebook-co... http://list25.com/25-things-facebook-could-buy-with-19-billion-instead-of-whatsapp/ http://list25.com/25-things-facebook-could-buy-with-19-billi... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10652397/Facebook-buys-WhatsApp-but-what-could-it-have-spent-the-money-on-instead.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10652397/Face...

jacquesm 12y ago
I get most of those except for the college football programs. But I do see why for others there is value there, bread, beer and entertainment (or, as it was in the old days, bread & circuses) have been able to capture very large audiences for millennia. (And the Music Industry and Heineken are reprentatives of the same category.)
- igravious 12y ago
  It is my opinion that it is generally fallacious to compare Market Cap with GDP. Why? Cuz GDP is a measure of economic output (throughput, generally per annum) whereas Market Cap is a measure of worth at a moment in time. The units don't match up but since they are frequently omitted we get unlike things being compared. What do you reckon?
  - roymurdock 12y ago
    Agreed - GDP is a historical record of a year's worth of activity. Therefore GDP more accurately corresponds to a company's net revenue - a net of what the country produced/consumed/spent/imported/exported/invested over a year. Market cap takes future earnings and total value into account. There is no such calculation for countries, but a country's "Market Cap" (potential) should, in most cases, be higher than its "Net Revenues.

readerrrr 12y ago

Only at first glance. They are valued at 10B$ and they still only launch less than 10 rockets per year. When they reach 100 or 1000 launches, their value will go up with the same ratio or even more. This is something WhatsApp can't possibly do, as their market can't grow much more, but space is only starting to.

danielweber 12y ago
No, the investors have already anticipated that. Modulo market risk, $10 billion is what SpaceX is expected to be worth.
- readerrrr 12y ago
  Sure right now. I was talking more about 10-20 years into the future.

gretful 12y ago

hell yeah, a messaging app won't save the human race. If Elon is successful in his endeavor, we won't have to worry about a single planet-event wiping out the human race.

harryh 12y ago
Elon is building a satellite launching company. Nowhere in that endeavor is the technology to permanently move a sufficient number of people to some other planet. The differences between what SpaceX does today and a self sufficient permanent colony on Mars are far far greater than the difference between what SpaceX does today and and the fireworks I shot off last weekend.
- ufmace 12y ago
  I don't think the people downvoting you realize just how big of a project a self-sufficient off-planet colony is. Nobody really knows how many people it would take to be self-sufficient, but I'm guessing that it's at least 100,000. The total number of people who have been to space, from all countries' space programs over the course of ~60 years or so, is 536, and not one of them has left Earth orbit. Looks like we need at least 3 orders of magnitude of improvement before we can even start to think about it. If SpaceX's program for reusable rockets succeeds beyond Musk's wildest dreams, we might get like 1 order of magnitude of cost reduction. There's still a hell of a long way to go, and that's if everything works perfectly. A semi-permanent colony might be doable, but anyone there wouldn't last long without regular resupply from Earth.
- readerrrr 12y ago
  You comment is doubly wrong. Spacex is definitely not limited to satellites, they are planning to launch people in space and are currently delivering cargo to the space station. There are plenty of information, some by Spacex, that show how their technology could be used for a permanent settlement on mars. Their goal: SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.
- 12y ago

smackfu 12y ago

Besides the other comments, it seems like a mistake to compare purchase price to investor valuations. Buying control of a company is worth a lot more than buying part of it.

damoncali 12y ago

There isn't a whole lot of money in space. There is a ton of money in communications.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cryptoz 12y ago
Much of the future of communications is in space. For example, a lot of the recent and upcoming SpaceX rocket launches are communications satellites.
- damoncali 12y ago
  Yeah, but that's nothing new, and there still isn't much money there. And space colonization is so far in the future it gets discounted down to zero. If SpaceX is mispriced, it's on the high side if you ask me.
- grondilu 12y ago
  > Much of the future of communications is in space. Not obvious. This month Google announced a big trans-pacific underwater internet cable system, for instance. Although it is clear satellites still have a major role in intercontinental communications, it's not clear to me whether this role will prevail in the future. ref: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-asian-companies-invest-trans-122646792.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-asian-companies-invest-...
TeMPOraL 12y ago
It's not the communications money that drives insane valuations of random apps, it's the advertising money.
dragonbonheur 12y ago
Get mining robots to an asteroid and there will be a LOT of money in space.

rsynnott 12y ago

Which one has most revenue potential, though? SpaceX makes medium-heavy rockets, and will soon make a super-heavy. This means that their primary competition is the Ariane 5 (especially once they have their super-heavy, which will allow them to compete in the heavy GTO market). Ariane 5 is currently on about 5 launches a year costing 140m euro a shot, and SpaceX plans to undercut it. Let's say they take the whole Ariane 5 market, and also the whole commercial Proton market. That's probably about a billion a year, in a fairly low-profit market. Of course, they also make some money on NASA contracting and grants, but I don't think anyone has ever managed a huge valuation on being a government contractor. It's entirely possible that SpaceX will open up whole new fields of space industry, but at this point it's hardly something that most people are going to bet on.

robotresearcher 12y ago
> I don't think anyone has ever managed a huge valuation on being a government contractor. Lockheed Martin is worth around $52B on the NYSE.
- rsynnott 12y ago
  Sorry, should have been clearer; I don't think anyone has ever managed a huge speculative valuation. Lockheed Martin has a normal big-company P/E (~16, about the same as Apple or Microsoft, or half of Google's); their price is justified by earnings. Now, if they had a Facebook-like (88) or Amazon-like (880) P/E, that'd be different.

rglover 12y ago

Definitely agree and that was my first thought after reading this headline. I'd say that it's due to delayed gratification/not seeing the forest for the trees.

athenot 12y ago

Value here is defined by how much it's worth to one (or more) people. Think of it as a price. It does not represent an objective contribution to humanity. Is a seat in Orchestra section really worth 3 times more than one in balcony? Hard to tell, but some will pay that difference because they consider it worth it FOR THEM, therefore that's the valuation of that seat.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

Unfortunately that's not how economics works. Inbuilt into your statement are a couple of biases. Chiefly, that on the basis of total economic value: glorified messaging app < puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science ...which is not necessarily the case. Now, we can talk all day about whether EMH is accurate or not and if the investors in these companies have "perfect information" or not, but there would have to be pretty conclusive evidence that there is something other than economic forces impacting investors valuation of these companies.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> glorified messaging app < puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science This is obviously not true if you count economic value, and obviously true if you count "value" as in something good and useful for humanity. In our economy, the former is a proxy for the latter, but both forms of "value" are getting more and more misaligned nowdays.

lnanek2 12y ago

What does SpaceX do as a business? Sell a few super expensive products per year. The number of governments and companies that can afford their product will never be large, ever. What does WhatsApp do? It hooks millions of consumers on freemium offerings and sells cheap add-ons to hundreds of thousands a year. Users often use it multiple times a day. WhatsApp sounds like a much better business.

pvnick 12y ago

Keep in mind that much of Facebook's purpose in buying WhatsApp was protection against it becoming the dominant player in social media. Facebook is always needing to protect itself against being overtaken by the Next Big Thing, so their strategy is to buy potential competitors before that happens. WhatsApp had a steep upward velocity, so the price Facebook paid for it was based less on its current worth and more on its trajectory.

fleitz 12y ago

Not at all, usually what the 'intelligensia' thinks are 'important' industries are not really that important at all. Things that benefit the common man are usually way better economic bets than lofty ideals. Getting most of india talking to each other is far more important than a 50 people circling the earth.

brooksbp 12y ago

Is "a glorified messaging app" vs. "puts things into orbit and literally does rocket science" a fair comparison? Surely there are deeper technical challenges and social motivations to "a glorified messaging app". How about considering the value of wide-spread human communication vs. multi-planetary human existence & space research?